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Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

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Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#11

Post by wallflower »

callahad wrote: post #6
nanijoe wrote: post #3

You can't trademark a word that's in the English dictionary can you?

http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html Some amusing entries: Aperture, Apple, Aqua, Bonjour, Boot Camp, Capitals, Carbon, Charcoal, Chicago, Cocoa, Exposé, Gadget, Inkwell, Instruments, Keychain, Keynote, Leopard, Logic, New York, Numbers, Pages, Panther, Photo Booth, Quartz, Rosetta, Safari, Sand, Shake, Shuffle, Soundtrack, Spaces, Spotlight, Techno, Textile, Tiger, Time Capsule, Time Machine, Tremor…

Let's not forget Windows

"If Microsoft loses the trademark battle, it will have a much more difficult time fending off imitators that promote their products with variations of the same name. Company officials say customers would be in danger of buying inferior products and that rivals would effectively get a free ride at Microsoft's expense."

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/25/business/microsoft-tradema...

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#12

Post by varaon »

plaggypig wrote: post #10

This is ridiculous. On Nov 21st 2008 a representative from Twitter said this, "There are certainly many applications out there that include Twitter as part of their name, but we prefer that you not do so. Twit, Tweet etc. are all fine." http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:SGqicWFJttIJ:groups.goog... Many people, myself included, acted upon this information in good faith (and in my case at a monetary cost for a domain…

It seems that they have the same problem the App Store has now - mixed messages as to what is acceptable, and no clear public guidelines.

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#13

Post by jonursenbach »

shabda wrote: post #4
lp456 wrote: post #2

Does anyone actually believe they will be pursuing companies using tweet or twit in URLs?

Yes. Consider this hypothetical scenario. Twitter builds image sharing as part of twitter.com at say twity.com. But twitpic.com is beating them all the way(better implementation, user inertia whatever). Is it hard to see someone at twitter, try to use their trademark to beat them? [Edit] Also in their response Twitter says, > As part of this support, we encourage developers of new applications and services built usin…

I honestly cannot see Twitter "building" anything new outside of their current feature set. If they are going to add a native image service, they're going to buy one of the current popular services (twitpic, yfrog, etc.) and integrate that.

Come on, they had to buy a search company to give people the ability to search their index, so the precedent is certainly there.

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#15

Post by elecengin »

Since they now have a trademark application in the works, they _must_ try to enforce it. When a company consistently neglects to enforce it's trademark and it becomes part of the language, it becomes a genericized trademark. it ends up in the same boat as "kleenex" and "xerox" and may not be enforceable in the future - a.k.a "genericide".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genericized_trademark

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#16

Post by Tichy »

OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements.

Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-(

On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one could make a case that, say, the word "mext" was already a common name for microblogging statements, nobody could trademark it for that anymore? Just when is it common enough - winning a competition would probably be insufficient?

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#17

Post by pavel_lishin »

ojbyrne wrote: post #14

I propose (well, actually Stephen Colbert proposed it) that Twat be the new Tweet.

I liked Merlin Mann's suggestion of "toot".

Furthermore, my friends and I have started referring to direct messages as "queefs".

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#18

Post by pavel_lishin »

I know it's unlikely that anyone here will miss this, but note http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682896 - the website Twitter was concerned about was TweetKnot, which looks pretty much exactly like a Twitter knock-off, down to the graphics.

Re: Twitter Grows Uncomfortable With The Use Of The Word Tweet In Applications

#19

Post by gojomo »

Tichy wrote: post #16

OK, contest time. Let's find the future word for microblogged statements. Is there a way to run such a contest in such a way that every suggested word is automatically free for all to use forever (unless it was trademarked before)? I almost fear no :-( On the other hand when I tried to trademark a word in Germany, it was rejected because it was deemed too common (I didn't think so, but whatever). So maybe if one coul…

A short, genericized name for the category is a good idea.

The existing descriptions -- 'status updates', 'activity streams', 'microblogging' -- are awkward for casual/verbed usage.

Possible veins of meaning to mine include:

* similarity to instant-messaging, but more public -- Public Instant Messaging, or PIMming. "I pimmed it." "Check out my pims on Facebook, Twitter, or Laconi.ca."

* similarity to loud-talking -- "shouting". (Could be a prefix letter to IM, as above, to "SIMming" or "SHIMing", or given an e-prefix like e-mail, "e-shouting".)

* conversely, similarity to talking to oneself -- "mumbling", mumble-IM ("mimming", "mimbling"), e-mumbling. (It's interesting that the activity is like both shouting and mumbling in different ways.)

* similarity to 'texting' (as I think your 'mext' example alludes to) -- public-texting ("pexting"), loud-texting ("lexting"), txt-blogging ("togging" or "tlogging"), blog-texting ("blexxing").

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